The Scarecrow

INTRODUCTION. AL-KONI’S DEMONS

Every so often out of the welter of the season’s publications comes a book that is not an imitation of some other book. It has the touch of reality, the voice of a person; it spreads out a landscape of its own in which one moves with easy familiarity. One does not think of it as a book, but as a real world of comfortable unreality.

Hughes Mearns wrote this in his introduction for a selection of poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, not for a novel by Ibrahim al-Koni, although it applies equally well to The Scarecrow. It seems uncanny that later, on the same page, he continued:

One might remark that a famous historic gentleman was an outstanding special pleader, a great soldier whose one defeat has amounted to an amazing victory, a distinguished actor of parts, a governor of a greater domain than that of any single nation of the present world, and guess as one might, no clue would be given to help in identifying the celebrated character. Few would know surely that the reference is to Beelzebub.¹

What is uncanny here is that the main character of The Scarecrow actually is a self-righteous, demonic despot who is as hollow as his physical avatar — a scarecrow in the fields of the oasis.

The Scarecrow begins right where The Puppet, the preceding novel of the New Waw or Oasis trilogy, left off. The conspirators, who assassinated the last leader of this Saharan oasis community because he opposed the use of gold in business transactions, meet to choose his successor. The choice is complicated by metaphysical considerations. Two realms—al-khafa’, the Spirit World, and al-khala’, the desert wasteland and by extension the material world of everyday life — coexist in the same time and space, but people in the physical world are normally oblivious to the Spirit World, which unbeknownst to them controls them in many ways, most directly by “possessing” leaders the moment they mount the throne.

In an essay called “Is Life Worth Living?” William James told the story of a frisky terrier that bites a boy and then watches as the owner pays the boy’s father, without having a clue as to its own involvement in this transaction.² James explained: “In the dog’s life we see the world invisible to him because we live in both worlds.”³ He suggested that if we assume there is a bigger picture, a spiritual framework, we will find that our daily life is worth living, even though we are no more aware of the spiritual world than our feisty terrier is of our financial transactions concerning him. Here is an American version of the possible relationship between al-khafa’, where the jinn (who rank between angels and human beings) live, and al-khala’, where people live. James, in a different essay, explained that the gap between human and canine perspectives cuts both ways:

Take our dogs and ourselves … how insensible, each of us [is], to all that makes life significant for the other … we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art.⁴

A question for readers of Ibrahim al-Koni’s works is whether the gap between human and jinn worlds challenges both us and the jinn who try to understand us. The Scarecrow suggests that the jinn may really lose their bearings when they visit our world.

In the novels of Ibrahim al-Koni, the dividing line between human beings and the jinn is blurred at times. In fact, wayfarers who meet in al-Koni’s desert typically ask one another whether they are of jinni or human heritage.⁵ In addition to leaders, other human beings who peep across the divide are diviners (like the tomb maiden in this trilogy), poets (often female in Tuareg culture), and Sufi dervishes. Not all jinn are demons, but all demons are jinn — or so it seems. Most of al-Koni’s demonic characters are male, although the Mute Soprano at the beginning of The Puppet comports herself in a demonic manner;⁶ most also serve as avatars — to some degree — of the Tuareg trickster Wantahet.

How coherent, then, are Ibrahim al-Koni’s depictions of demons or the demonic through his many novels? Are all these demonic figures a single demon, several different demons, mere plot devices, or especially endowed characters? If there is one archdemon — say Wantahet of Tuareg mythology — is he more like Satan of the Abrahamic religions, Seth of ancient Egypt, or a West African trickster deity like Eshu? Put another way: since al-Koni identifies himself as a Saharan author, does it help to check out his neighborhood (Egypt to the east and West Africa to the southwest) and his own Sufi and European, etc., formation when interpreting his novels? Does comparison with Egyptian and African trickster gods illuminate al-Koni’s depictions of the demonic?⁷

Luc-Willy Deheuvels, for one, has written that al-Koni’s ideal reader will know everything about Arab and Islamic culture, Tuareg culture, and black African culture — not to mention European culture from ancient Greece to the present.⁸ Ibrahim al-Koni himself has clearly stated that he views ancient Egyptian culture to be part of his Tuareg heritage. Some ancient peoples settled in the Nile Valley and others returned to the desert.⁹

The protagonist of Ibrahim al-Koni’s novel al-Bahth ‘An al-Makan al-Da’i‘ (published in English as The Seven Veils of Seth) is a Satanic trickster named Isan who eventually destroys the oasis that has offered him its hospitality, but only because he wishes a better, destabilizing, nomadic existence for its residents. That novel’s Arabic title is a play on Proust’s famous title A la recherche du temps perdu; in al-Koni’s novel the search is for lost space, for the lost paradise of Waw,¹⁰ for which this new oasis, New Waw, has been named. The author encourages the reader to think of Isan as an avatar of Seth, who in the ancient Egyptian religion killed his brother Osiris (the good god of agriculture) in order to seize the throne, but who was also the desert god and therefore a benevolent champion of desert dwellers.

David S. Noss says that in ancient Iran, “The wild nomads to the north … were the scourge of all good settlers,” and that their religion was a foil against which Zoroaster rebelled in founding Zoroastrianism as a religion for settled peoples and in transforming the nomads’ godly devas into nature demons.¹¹ In The Seven Veils of Seth, Ibrahim al-Koni draws on the tension between these two opposing visions of Seth to provide depth to his portrait of his protagonist. Seth (or Isan), then, is not merely a demon but a god of necessary disorder.

The twentieth-century Iranian engineer, lay theologian, and reform politician Mehdi Bazargan explained in an essay: “Conflict, one of whose quintessential representatives for human beings is Satan, is the cause of a plethora of blessed events, from the natural cycle of life on earth to the higher cycle of resurrection in the hereafter.” Three paragraphs earlier in the same essay he remarked: “Movement … is a blessing and a source of survival and evolution, while rigidity is a cause of stasis, decline, and death.”¹² Hilary Austen, author of Artistry Unleashed: A Guide to Pursuing Great Performance in Work and Life, pointed out — in a similar vein but in a totally different context (how unleashing the artist in a business setting can help a firm “move on”) — that the opposite of chaos is not order but stagnation.¹³

WANTAHET

Al-Koni’s Oasis (or New Waw) trilogy begins with New Waw (Waw al-Sughra),¹⁴ continues with The Puppet (al-Dumya), and ends with al-Fazza‘a (The Scarecrow). This eponymous protagonist of the third novel appeared in The Puppet to offer good advice to that novel’s well-intentioned hero. In al-Fazza‘a, though, his destruction of the oasis — which he justifies as an appropriate reward for the community’s contempt for his benefactions — seems malicious and vengeful.¹⁵ A voice in the crowd at a food distribution in this novel warns that this may be another version of Wantahet’s infamous banquet, and the chapter called “Wantahet” gives a version of this famous banquet as part of a folktale about a contest between proponents respectively of anger, envy, hatred, and revenge. Paradoxically, the chief vassal of New Waw remarks to its demonic ruler that by repaying good with evil he has demonstrated that he is a human being, not a demon. In al-Koni’s novel Lawn al-La‘na (The Color of the Curse), the demonic protagonist, who even has an evil apprentice, is so evil that the ambiguous interplay of good and evil (or between stagnation and chaos) seems lost. He is said to have sold his soul to the “Master of Dark Tyrannies” and therefore to have returned as a devil.¹⁶ This demon in Lawn al-La‘na is also referred to as Wantahet.¹⁷

Are all these demons different forms of Wantahet, who is trying to show us the way back to Waw, the real Tuareg paradise? If God is so good that He can bring good out of evil (as Thomas Aquinas argued in a passage al-Koni has used for an epigraph), should we thank God for demons? Incidentally, the demon — in at least some of al-Koni’s many novels — is a counterweight to the tribe’s leaders, not to God, and the lost Law of the Tuareg people plays the part that might elsewhere be assumed by God. In al-Koni’s novel Anubis, moreover, the ancient goddess Tanit has top billing, not a male god or demon.

Ibrahim al-Koni obviously draws on many traditions and authors from Tuareg to Russian to Chinese and American, and adds literary and mythological allusions the way an artist applies washes or glazes to give added depth to a painting. Are al-Koni’s references to Seth and other demonic figures merely mythological washes or part of a consistent storyline that forms part of his own or of Tuareg mythology?

In The Seven Veils of Seth, the chief of the oasis community teases his visitor: “How can you expect our elders not to think ill of you when you arrive on the back of a jenny, as if you were the accursed Wantahet, who has been the butt of jokes for generations?”¹⁸ As their exchange continues, the chief reminds the visitor: “The strategist known as Wantahet also claimed he would carry people on the path of deliverance the day he cast them down the mouth of the abyss.”¹⁹ There is a more complete version of this accusation later in the novel: “The master of the jenny at the end of time would approach villages to entice tribes to a banquet only to pull the banquet carpet out from under them, allowing them to fall into a bottomless abyss.”²⁰ These references to the Wantahet of Tuareg mythology appear in several of al-Koni’s novels. When the translator asked Ibrahim al-Koni for further details from Tuareg folklore about Wantahet, the author replied that he starts with the folkloric scraps he has and uses them as a starting point. In his “Témoinage,” al-Koni said that he has created his own desert and filled it with his own symbols and archetypes.²¹

ANCIENT EGYPT: SETH

Ancient Egyptian attitudes toward Seth underwent an evolution and are not consistent across the literature and over the centuries. Put another way: the study of Seth in ancient Egyptian religion is the domain of specialists. H. Te Velde, one such expert, in Seth, God of Confusion says, for example, that if “In mythology and for many Egyptians Seth” was “the divine foreigner” or the “god of confusion, for the faithful he was also unrestrictedly god.” He adds, however, that: “after the 20^th dynasty” not only were “no new temples … built” for Seth but there is no “evidence that existing temples of Seth were restored.”²²

Isan in The Seven Veils of Seth is called the Jenny Master, because he rides a she-ass, and a vivid account is offered of how he learned to hate camels and love a wild she-ass.²³ Similarly, the hero of Lawn al-La‘na is said to have traveled south to Africa’s forestlands on a camel with a caravan but to have returned on a she-ass.²⁴ H. Te Velde in Seth, God of Confusion includes a chapter about the “Seth-animal,” which has been connected with various mammals, real and imaginary, including the wild ass.²⁵ E. A. Wallis Budge in The Gods of the Egyptians says that “The Ass, like many animals, was regarded by Egyptians both as a god and a devil.”²⁶ To be sure, there is also in the Islamic history of the Maghreb a famous Sahib al-Himar: Abu Yazid Mukallad ibn Kayrad al-Nukkari (d. 947 CE), a Berber who led a rebellion against Fatimid rule in what is today Tunisia. He was known as the Ass Master because he rode a donkey.

Te Velde quotes a text in which Seth announces, “I am Seth who causes confusion and thunders in the horizon of the sky….”²⁷ Seth, then, is the lord of rain, although “in Egypt vegetation and the fertility of the soil is not dependent on rain, but on the inundation of the Nile.”²⁸

A potion that al-Koni’s Isan slips into the pool causes women in the oasis to miscarry, but he can also cure their fertility problems. Te Velde says of Seth that he is “the god who brings about abortion.”²⁹ Seth’s method of cure underscores his sexual prowess. Te Velde says, “Seth is a god of sexuality which is not canalized into fertility.”³⁰

In The Seven Veils of Seth, both the character Isan — who doubles as Seth and Wantahet — and the repeated references to the lost Tuareg Law promote nomadism (and tribalism) and discourage settled life in an oasis where tribalism is diluted. If religions tend to promote group solidarity — whether locally or globally — it seems reasonable that a demon like Seth should, in the later eras of ancient Egypt, be portrayed as a deviant foreigner.

Te Velde explains, “Because Seth repeatedly proved to have been collaborating in maintaining the cosmic order, though in a peculiar way, Seth could be worshipped.”³¹ Once the worship of Seth fell from favor, however, Seth became “exclusively a demonic murderer and chaotic power….”³² and “a dreadful demon of the black magicians”³³ and thus no longer “the ancient Egyptian god of the desert and divine foreigner….”³⁴

If E. O. Wilson and others are correct in ascribing to religion the role of reinforcing an innate human tendency toward tribalism by encouraging human groups that prefer the group’s members to outsiders,³⁵ then a religion’s demons should also serve this purpose. Even though he is a neo-Darwinian, Wilson embraces Jung’s archetypes and lists two “of the most frequently cited” as “The Trickster” who “disturbs established order” and “A monster” that “threatens humanity … (Satan writhing at the bottom of hell)….”³⁶

Jung claimed in “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” that these archetypes are “primordial types … universal images that have existed since the remotest times.”³⁷ If he is correct, the net must be cast over all of human experience, not simply Africa or Europe. In “On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure” he pointed out that Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible exhibits

not a few reminders of the unpredictable behavior of the trickster, of his senseless orgies of destruction … together with the same gradual development into a savior and his simultaneous humanization. It is just this transformation of the meaningless into the meaningful that reveals the trickster’s compensatory relation to the “saint.”³⁸

One main theme of The Scarecrow is the humanization of the demonic protagonist. Does this transformation also help the meaningless become meaningful? If Jung was even partially correct about archetypes, then many other players can be introduced with questions like: Is Shiva’s role of constructive destruction in the Hindu Trimurti similar to that played by al-Koni’s demon?

WEST AFRICA

Robert D. Pelton, in his book The Trickster in West Africa, says that “the trickster pulls the most unyielding matter — disease, ugliness, greed, lust, lying, jealousy — into the orbit of life….”³⁹ He also says, earlier, that “His presence … represents a ceaseless informing of structure with rawness and formlessness and a boundless confidence that such a process is truly constructive.”⁴⁰ Roger D. Abrahams, in African Folktales, says of the trickster that he “represents primal creativity and pathological destructiveness, childish innocence, and self-absorption.” He “lives in the wilds, but makes regular incursions into the human community …” and “is sexually voracious.”⁴¹ Abrahams summarizes:

the vitality and the protean abilities of Trickster … are continually fascinating and … carry … the characteristic African message that life is celebrated most fully through the dramatizing of oppositions.⁴²

Viewed from a West African perspective, the scarecrow phenomenon in the final two novels of al-Koni’s Oasis trilogy (The Puppet and The Scarecrow) are masquerades, perhaps comparable to the Yoruba egungun, a returning ancestor. Moreover, the idea that a spirit or god may take possession of a worshiper or borrow random body parts to visit the market has a wealth of West African parallels.

ESHU

Eshu stands out among the 401 Yoruba orisha who either represent dimensions of Olorun, the sky god, or serve him, because Eshu acts as their messenger. Few of Africa’s traditional gods are portrayed in African art, but Eshu’s face is usually carved on the Ifa divination tray. God of the road, he may be worshiped at a crossroads. In the chapter called “The Scarecrow,” we learn that cunning strategists in Tuareg culture are cautious at crossroads. Eshu is also a trickster who deliberately starts fights, but these fights normally promote sacrifices to the orisha — he receives a commission — and therefore improve human conduct.

Noel Q. King, in African Cosmos, first warns Muslims and Christians against confusing Eshu with Satan and then cautions anthropologists against seeing him as the trickster. (King refers to him instead as the Prankster — a subtle distinction.) If Eshu deceives “people into wrong behavior,” that is primarily “so they may gain favor by their expiation and feed the divinities with their offerings.”⁴³ Similarly, in his book The Trickster in West Africa, Robert D. Pelton says that by starting a quarrel between two friends, Eshu demonstrates that their “friendship was held together by custom, not by mutual awareness” or by “a willingness to undergo modification together.”⁴⁴ Fixing a chair that was poorly repaired or a bone that was improperly set may require breaking it again first. In his excellent article about al-Koni, Sabry Hafez was, then, perhaps overly influenced by Semitic precedents when he identified the Tuareg Wantahet (wantahit) as “Beelzebub, the prince of the evil spirits.”⁴⁵ This is odd, because on the previous page he said, “the desert’s spiritual balance is maintained by an amalgam of African and ancient Egyptian tenets.”⁴⁶ His reference then was, admittedly, to the role of ancestors’ spirits, not to demons. A few pages later he identified Wantahet himself, specifically, as “the prince of evil spirits…”⁴⁷ and then after that said that one of the characters is “the personification of wantahit, Beelzebub.”⁴⁸ A more African Wantahet is, arguably, a more interesting (and more authentically Tuareg) literary demon. In the chapter called “Wantahet” in The Scarecrow, Wantahet is presented as the advocate of revenge or retribution. Thus, he plays a role parallel to that of Eshu as a trickster who rebalances the scales of justice in the novel by pulling a carpet out from under the feet of malefactors.

Pelton also says that Eshu’s “presence in the market is indeed a phallic presence, loaded with volatile, unstable energy.” He observes,

Eshu embodies sexuality as unleashed desire — not lust merely, nor even avarice, envy or greed, but that passion for what lies outside one’s grasp which the Greeks saw in some sense as the sovereign mover of human life.⁴⁹

Pelton summarizes: “Eshu does not only present riddles; he is one.”⁵⁰ Seth, in The Seven Veils of Seth, poses riddles as well and definitely is one.

Manning Marable in Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention at one point calls Malcolm X a North American version of a West African trickster, saying that Malcolm X:

presented himself as the embodiment of the two central figures of African-American folk culture, simultaneously the hustler/trickster and the preacher/minister. Janus-faced, the trickster is unpredictable, capable of outrageous transgressions; the minister saves souls, redeems shattered lives, and promises a new world.⁵¹

These roles are precisely — albeit perhaps coincidentally — the two sides of Isan’s character in The Seven Veils of Seth, of the mythic Wantahet character in Tuareg folklore, and of al-Koni’s demons, as in The Scarecrow.

One other parallel to African American culture is the occasional use by al-Koni of call-and-response passages like the second section of the second chapter, “The Prophecy,” in The Scarecrow.

AL-KONI’S MYSTICAL, SUFI, AND EUROPEAN FORMATION

Seth and Eshu, admittedly, may not have been the only inspirations for the development of the demonic hero in the novels of al-Koni, because other forces — like Sufism and Russian literature — have also been part of his formation.

Ziad Elmarsafy, in his book Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel, has an elegant chapter devoted to demonstrating the central place of Sufism not only in the novels of Ibrahim al-Koni but in explaining his sense of mission as a novelist. He refers, for example, to al-Koni’s motif of “the wanderings of individuals in the desert” as “a mystical ecology.”⁵² He says that “Al-Koni’s use of Sufi elements is present in his writings from the outset.”⁵³ Moreover, “It is no accident that his repertoire of stock characters includes … the spiritual master and the disciple.”⁵⁴ Although Wantahet in al-Koni’s novels is accused of inviting people to a banquet on a carpet spread over an abyss, Elmarsafy explains: “Al-Koni makes clear that the abyss (al-hawiya) is a key step in a spiritual journey, during which the traveller’s suffering is at its worst.”⁵⁵ This Sufi interpretation of the abyss totally transforms the meaning of Wantahet’s banquet. Referring to the division of the Tuareg world into a visible and an invisible sphere, Elmarsafy summarizes a discussion of the subject by Hélène Claudot-Hawad and repeats her point that it is the Sufi, not the tribal leader, who can move between the two spheres.⁵⁶ Wantahet then becomes a Sufi prototype, and al-hawiya—the abyss or pit beneath the banquet blanket — becomes one of the stages on the Sufi path. Thus Wantahet’s invitation to the abyss becomes an invitation to a form of union with the divine. A member of the Council of Elders says in The Scarecrow: “We must accept the abyss if the fall into it has been willed by the Spirit World.”

Iblis, who in Islamic belief is the chief devil, has a better reputation with some Sufis than with Shari‘ah-minded, act-right Muslims, precisely because he refused to bow to anyone save God. Thus, arguably, he was the sincerest monotheist. Moreover, the Beloved’s curse bestows enviable recognition on the lover, because it shows God’s interest in that individual. In Farid ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, for example, Eblis (Iblis) says: “All creatures seek throughout the universe/What will be mine for ever now — Your curse!”⁵⁷ Finally, Elmarsafy has several pages of analysis of what he terms al-Koni’s own “Sufi Autobiography,” Marathi Ulis.⁵⁸

Attar’s ambivalence about Satan, the ultimate monotheist, is only part of the problem, as Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis point out in their introduction when they refer to “the Sufi love of paradox” being deployed as “a way of jolting the reader out of his normal expectations of the world….” Furthermore, they warn that “Objects and individuals don’t maintain their allegorical significance from one story to another, so the meanings of the symbols in each story have to be worked out anew.”⁵⁹

Another element of al-Koni’s formation has been Russian literature, including authors like Dostoyevsky. Al-Koni has written of his “specific and intimate” relationship with Dostoyevsky, whom he has referred to as his master. He highlights the influence on him of Dostoyevsky’s “philosophic dimension and his symbolic system.” In this context, al-Koni says that a novel can be considered “ideas transformed into life” and that no other novelist was able to treat “abstract ideas and incarnate them in life” better than Dostoyevsky.⁶⁰

Marc Slonim, in his introduction to an English translation of The Brothers Karamazov, brings attention to human transgression:

The compulsion toward transgression … was to Dostoyevsky, a basic human compulsion; man does not accept his condition, nor does he accept the world which determined this condition.⁶¹

In The Scarecrow’s chapter called “The Gifts,” the newly anointed demonic ruler tempts the elders, who have proclaimed him leader of Waw, with gifts from his wonder-sack, exactly as if he were Mephistopheles tempting Faust.

CONCLUSION

All these extra varnishes or glazes on the painted surface of some of Ibrahim al-Koni’s novels enhance and reinforce the image of al-Koni’s demon as an agent of chaos construed as creative disorder, which is destabilizing but also necessary for growth — economic, physical, or spiritual. In The Scarecrow, once the demon becomes a despot, some of the balance or tension may be lost. The term theosis in Eastern Christianity refers to the doctrine asserting that if God can become man, men can become godlike. In al-Koni’s novels, if man can become demonic, jinnis can become human. There is no abyss or Sufi salvation under a carpet at the end of The Scarecrow, and the senior demon in Lawn al-La‘na may be the least interesting of al-Koni’s demons because he is so monochromatic, so evil.

Ancient Egyptian and West African sacred stories (myths) can serve as points of reference for interpreting demonic humans and humane demons in the works of Ibrahim al-Koni. Recent history, though, is also relevant. In a series of telephone conversations, Ibrahim al-Koni told the translator frequently that he is not a political person and not a political author. All the same, Colonel Qaddafi was, he has also said, one of The Scarecrow’s multiple inspirations. Since the Arabic novel was completed and published in 1998, the crisis at the end refers not to the Libyan leader’s final year but to an earlier confrontation between Libya and the international community. The scarecrow (or Wantahet) and Qaddafi may have shared some West African characteristics: eccentricity that verges on the criminal, virility or male sexuality separated from fertility, self-centered exploitation of a culture of individual empowerment, encouragement or exploitation of tribalism, the embrace of nomadism or at least of the tent as a personal symbol, and acceptance of the role of Nietzsche’s Űbermensch (or overman), whose antics, however deadly, never truly threaten the survival of the herd — or at least did not threaten it until the invention of weapons of mass destruction.

In short, a much fuller, more nuanced portrait of Wantahet and his avatars — who are frequent visitors to Ibrahim al-Koni’s novels — is provided by looking outside the traditional characterization of Satan by the three main Abrahamic religions.

In The Fetishists, al-Koni had Adda, the leader, explain: “Goodness, like truth, is an angel that speeds unimpeded across the countryside, but when a human hand seizes it and places it in a flask, it turns into an evil demon.”⁶²

1. Hughes Mearns, introduction to Edna St. Vincent Millay, by Edna St. Vincent Millay (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1927), 8.

2. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 52.

3. Ibid., 53.

4. William James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” in Essays on Faith and Morals, selected by Ralph Barton Perry (Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Company, Meridian Books, 1962), 260.

5. See The Seven Veils of Seth, trans. William M. Hutchins (Reading, UK: Garnet Publishing, 2008), 134.

6. See The Puppet, trans. William M. Hutchins (Austin: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, at the University of Texas at Austin, 2010), 1–9.

7. Elliott Colla provides a cautionary tale in an article in Banipal; he was thinking of Jahili Arabic poetry in conjunction with a passage by al-Koni, who pointed him to Moby-Dick instead. Elliott Colla, “Translating Ibrahim al-Koni,” Banipal 40 (Spring 2011): 175.

8. Luc-Willy Deheuvels, “Le lieu de l’utopie dans l’oeuvre d’Ibrahim al-Kawni,” in La Poétique de l’espace dans la littérature arabe moderne, ed. Boutros Hallaq, Robin Ostle, and Stefan Wild (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002), 25.

9. Ibrahim al-Koni, “Le ‘discours’ du desert: Témoinage,” in La Poétique de l’espace, 97–98.

10. The title of the English translation—The Seven Veils of Seth—is based on the author’s inscription in the copy of the Arabic novel he sent the translator.

11. David S. Noss, A History of the World’s Religions, 10th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999), 355.

12. Mehdi Bazargan, “Religion and Liberty,” in Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook, ed. Charles Kurzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 82.

13. Hilary Austen, interview by Peter Day on Global Business, BBC World Service, in an episode entitled “Thinking about Thinking,” updated March 31, 2011.

14. The novel al-Waram (The Tumor), in which the ruler finds that his official robe has fused with his skin, is related to this trilogy but seems to stand outside the plot sequence of the trilogy per se. The four volumes have been marketed separately in Arabic.

15. In a private conversation at Georgetown University on April 28, 2011, Ibrahim al-Koni said he had the first international blockade of Libya in mind when he wrote The Scarecrow.

16. Lawn al-La‘na (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-‘Arabiya li-l-Dirasat wa-l-Nashr, 2005), 14.

17. Ibid., 236.

18. The Seven Veils of Seth, 75.

19. Ibid., 76.

20. Ibid., 143.

21. Al-Koni, “Témoinage,” 97.

22. H. Te Velde, Seth, God of Confusion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967), 138–139.

23. The Seven Veils of Seth, 129 ff.

24. Lawn al-La‘na, 15.

25. Te Velde, 13–26.

26. E. A. Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904; New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 2:367.

27. Te Velde, 106.

28. Ibid., 54.

29. Ibid., 29.

30. Ibid., 55.

31. Ibid., 140.

32. Ibid., 141.

33. Ibid., 148.

34. Ibid., 147.

35. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998; New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 280–281.

36. Ibid., 244.

37. C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, vol. 9, 2nd ed., trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), part 1, 4–5.

38. Ibid., 256.

39. Robert D. Pelton, The Trickster in West Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 252.

40. Ibid.

41. Roger D. Abrahams, African Folktales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 155.

42. Ibid., 156.

43. Noel Q. King, African Cosmos: An Introduction to Religion in Africa (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1986), 10–11.

44. Pelton, 142.

45. Sabry Hafez, “The Novel of the Desert: Poetics of Space and Dialectics of Freedom,” in La Poétique de l’espace, 67.

46. Ibid., 66.

47. Ibid., 76.

48. Ibid., 80

49. Ibid., 161.

50. Ibid., 162.

51. Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011), 11.

52. Ziad Elmarsafy, Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 107.

53. Ibid., 108.

54. Ibid., 110.

55. Ibid., 129.

56. Ibid., 112.

57. Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds, trans. Afkham Darbandi & Dick Davis, rev. ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2011), 182. See also Faridu’d-Din Attar, The Speech of the Birds, trans. P. W. Avery (Cambridge, UK: The Islamic Texts Society, 1998), 293 for a less memorable but more complete translation of the same passage.

58. Elmarsafy, 130–138.

59. Attar, xvii — xviii.

60. Al-Koni, “Témoinage,” 101.

61. Marc Slonim, introduction to The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (New York: The Modern Library, 1950), ix.

62. Ibrahim al-Koni, al-Majus, 4th printing (Beirut: al-Multaka Publishing, 2001), 47.